Julie Andrews writes about early life

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- When Julie Andrews was 14, her mother took her to a party at the home of a man in a nearby town.

At her mother's bidding, the girl sang a song for the guests and sat down for a talk with the host, who was "tall and fleshly handsome."

Andrews drove home because her mother was too drunk to drive. On the way, her mother blurted out the news: "That man was your father."

The girl was shocked. All her life she had thought her mother's husband was her father, a schoolteacher named Ted Wells, and she loved him as a natural parent. The fact that Wells was not her father was one of the many travails of Andrews' life, which included dealing with alcoholism in the family and spending nights in bomb shelters while the Germans bombed London.

"I thought about it for years that my dad was not my dad," Andrews said in an interview with The Associated Press at her eighth-floor office in a Brentwood high-rise. "Was my mother sure? Was it a flight of fancy on her part? I finally asked my aunt, and she answered that my father did know that he was not my (biological) father."